This specification relates to processing public social connection information.
With the proliferation of online social sites (web sites with social features), a typical user may maintain several user accounts across multiple social sites. Knowledge of a user's set of social identities (different identities used by the user on different social sites) is useful for improving the performance of applications that process and present information to users. Typically, an online social service determines additional identities of a user from information the user has provided explicitly, but a user may not provide a full list of all the user's alternate identities to any particular social service.
Many social web sites allow users to list their additional accounts and various social connections publicly, and the social web sites also annotate the users' public information with such user data using markup such as XHTML Friends Network (XFN) or Friend of a Friend Project (FOAF) markup. Such annotation makes it possible for social information to be collected from different social web sites by a web crawler. Since a large amount of such user data is publicly available, and public information is largely unverified, it is difficult to identify all of the social accounts belonging to one user from collected public social account information.